Hands On With Clueful, the iOS App That Rats Out Privacy Risks

The Clueful app clues you in on how apps use your data. Image: Christina Bonnington/Wired

When you install a new mobile app, you expect it to use your data according to the permissions you’ve allowed. So, when an app suddenly uses your information in an unexpected way — who can forget Path’s address-book-sharing saga? — it can feel like a betrayal.

Clueful, which made its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is an app designed to prevent surprises. Clueful helps you identify “misdemeanant” apps on your iPhone — software that’s transmitting your data in ways you weren’t aware of.

Created by antivirus software developer Bitdefender, the app is simple enough. It gathers information on what apps are running in your iPhone’s memory and submits it anonymously to the “Clueful Cloud” for analysis. Using its own database of app behaviors, it then tells you what your software could be up to: whether an app uses GPS, whether an app is a battery-draining risk, or if an app can use address book information, among other things. The results are neatly listed, albeit in what appears to be random order, and you can tap an app listing to get more details on the possible risk areas of that app.

It’s not all fire and brimstone, though. The app also reveals “Things you might appreciate” for each app, such as information on whether it uses an anonymous identifier or encrypts stored data. (Foodspotting, for instance, does both of these things.)

It can be surprising to learn which apps do and don’t have solid security practices, and which apps are quietly tracking usage information for advertising purposes — something most apps do not openly reveal when you download them.

The app has several major pitfalls, though. For one, it can only provide information on free apps, so that sketchy $1 Angry Birds ripoff you got last week could be having a field day with your personal info, and you’d still never know it. And although it launches with a database of thousands of apps, there are more than 600,000 apps in the App Store, according to Apple’s Q2 earnings report. Clueful lets you search to see which apps are in its database, and we found some relatively big names were left out: Clear, Mint and Evi to name just three.

Also, Clueful doesn’t drill down into exactly what data is being transmitted from an app. Instead, it just generally reports what an app can and could be sending. (“Can” and “could” are differentiated.) Strangely, Clueful also “found” apps on my phone that I’ve never used or downloaded, like FlickFishing HD in the image above, and apps called Scoops and Quizarium. I’m sure they’re fine apps, but I’ve never downloaded them.

At $4 in the App Store, I can’t rightly recommend this app as a must-download. But if you’re completely anal about how your data is being used, or just curious, the download could be justified.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.